Companies that provide social media marketing around Alabama as well as abroad have years of experience in marketing, are social media savvy, and have nothing but time to devote to making your business shine on the web. Small business owners and other organizations in comparison usually don’t have any of those.
So how can you even begin to imagine running your own social media marketing campaigns? How do other businesses without huge marketing budgets manage to use social media to attract customers – and how do they come up with ideas that make things like Facebook and Twitter work for their business?
Based on some info sharing from the pros and our own experience in social media marketing, here’s a stream of tips for you to keep in mind when it comes time to launch your own campaign.
Custom Tabs in Social Media Marketing
If you’re a business owner with a FB presence, you have the ability to create custom tabs. These tabs allow you to promote special offers. The new Timeline takes away the ability to make people land on custom tabs, so now you have to draw attention to those tabs. You can do that using the custom tab photo and custom tab name.
Manage your Time with BufferApp
Bufferapp is a great application for managing content, allowing you to easy schedule content across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It also allows you share content from other sites, similar to how Pinterest functions in repining content. That allows you to curate content when your coffers run dry on what to post/share.
Create an Editorial Calendar
Your editorial calendar is critical to success with social media marketing in Mobile, AL and your audience throughout the nation or region. If you just wing it, you’ll be posting random content with no real direction. The editorial calendar provides structure with timing for posts, frequency, topics and more.
People often ask me how often they should be posting to social media sites like Facebook. Research suggests 3-5 times per day. That needs to take place almost every day with weekends excluded (unless that’s the best time to reach your audience).
Once you create the schedule for timing and content, stick with it. Your customers will appreciate regular updates and it keeps you in touch. If you have large gaps, they lose interest and it becomes more difficult to win them back.
Dealing with Tough Questions
If you have to answer to someone about your social media marketing, you need to make sure you’re measuring success and you know what success looks like. Part of developing a social media marketing calendar is identifying key performance indicators. This allows you do more of what is working, and stop doing what is not working. This also allows you to answer questions posed to you about “what is our ROI”.
Social media marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. It will inevitably consume some of your time, but how much is up to you. With a strategy in place, you can approach it knowing exactly what needs to be done. If you wing it, expect to waste a lot of time on trial and error without fully understanding what’s working.